Mieczysław Pemper

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Pemper in April 1940

Mieczysław "Mietek" Pemper (born March 24, 1920 in Krakow ; † June 7, 2011 in Augsburg ) was a German - Polish concentration camp prisoner in the Plaszow concentration camp , which was under the direction of Amon Göth .

As a prisoner, he was assigned the position of the personal clerk of a concentration camp commandant , which was a unique special case in the entire concentration camp system. Through his work in Göth's office when Göth and the German secretary were absent, he was able to gain insight into secret SS documents, so that he was able to pass important information to Oskar Schindler and later become an important contemporary witness .

Life

The Jewish German Pole Mietek Pemper was imprisoned with his family in 1941 in the “Jewish residential area” in Podgórze , which was called the Krakow Ghetto in the post-war period . In March 1943 he was deported as a prisoner to the Plaszow (German: Plaschau) concentration camp , where he remained prisoner until September 1944.

Almost during his entire time in the concentration camp, he worked as the personal stenographer of the camp commandant Amon Göth due to his knowledge of multilingual shorthand . As it turned out later at the trial of Gerhard Maurer , this was a unique and special position: In no other concentration camp had it happened that a prisoner was allowed to be a clerk for the camp commandant.

This unique situation made the special collaboration with Schindler possible. In order to avoid punishment for spelling mistakes in names, Pemper regularly inspected the carbon paper sheets of the German secretary Göths for secret documents. These included correspondence from the SS and the regime. He discovered the order to dissolve all warehouses with so-called non-war production, which was given a few months after Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus had surrendered in Stalingrad. Pemper was able to pass the information on to the factory owner Oskar Schindler and his Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern . Among other things, he enabled Schindler to switch from the production of kitchenware made of sheet metal to the production of grenade cases in good time . As an armaments company, it received approval from the SS to relocate the company with the prisoners to Moravia. Schindler was allowed to take 1,200 Jewish prisoners with him to the newly established subcamp Brünnlitz in order to continue the war-essential production .

Gravestone of Pemper in the Jewish cemetery in Augsburg

When Göth was arrested in September 1944 for embezzling valuables, Schindler was also able to take Pemper into his factory as a forced laborer and thus save him from murder.

After the defeat of the Nazi regime, Pemper began studying sociology in Poland and obtained a master's degree in economics. He also looked after his sick mother and worked as an interpreter in the war crimes trials in Poland, such as the Krakow Auschwitz trial . He also testified at some of these court hearings, in particular he was the main witness in the trial of Amon Göth.

In 1958, Pemper moved from Poland to southern Germany and worked as a management consultant in Augsburg. The Augsburg honorary citizen died on June 7, 2011 in the Augsburg Clinic .

On the site of the former Sheridan barracks in the Augsburg district of Pfersee, a path has been named after him since March 2012.

Contemporary witness

Pemper's reports served, among other things, the director Steven Spielberg as the basis of his film Schindler's List , published in 1993 , through which over 100 million people around the world learned of the rescue operation. For dramaturgical reasons, Spielberg summarized the activities of Pemper and Stern in the figure of the Schindler accountant, so that Pemper's share was less known.

Only by working through his life story for Spielberg was Pemper able to bring himself to tell his fate in school classes and in lectures. Together with Viktoria Hertling and Marie Elisabeth Müller, he published his memories in 2005 in the book Der rettende Weg. Schindler's List - The Real Story .

Awards and honors

literature

  • Mietek Pemper: The saving way. Schindler's List - The Real Story . Recorded by Viktoria Hertling and Marie Elisabeth Müller. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2010 (first time 2005). ISBN 978-3-455-50183-4 . ( Reviews at perlentaucher.de )
  • Andrea Löw, Markus Roth: Jews in Krakow under German occupation 1939–1945 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2011
  • Viktoria Hertling: Mietek Pemper . Hentrich & Hentrich Verlag, Berlin / Leipzig 2020, ISBN 978-3-95565-371-2 .

Movies

Kathrin Sänger , the director of Schindler's List - A True Story , traveled to Israel for Spiegel-TV in the 2010s to interview the last survivors who had worked in Oskar Schindler's factory. She interviews Ignaz and Rena Birnhack, Mietek Pemper (film role of Itzhak Stern, stenographer von Göth) and Helen Jonas-Rosenzweig (role of Helene Hirsch; as a 17-year-old household slave to Göth, called Susanne), Bornislawa Horowitz Karakulska , Moshe Bejski .
I.a. They tell how Schindler managed to bring back 300 women who had already been transported to Auschwitz about 14 days later. It was the only such large transport of prisoners from Birkenau. When the Red Army advanced on Brünnlitz in 1945, he was able to flee Czechoslovakia a few hours before their arrival with the help of “his” Jews. You and he knew that if the Russians caught him, the Nazi and factory manager, they would hang him before he could say anything. The previous slave workers protect him with a group accompanying him as far as Bavaria. There are also reports of his visits to Israel: twice a year the impoverished Schindler from Germany travels to Israel for a few weeks to relax, at the invitation of his “children”, as he calls his former “employees”. His handling of the money collected for him is discussed.

Web links

Commons : Mietek Pemper  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mietek Pemper in an interview, April 28, 2007
  2. ↑ Augsburger Allgemeine of June 8, 2011: Oskar Schindler's companion Mietek Pemper is dead , queried on June 10, 2011
  3. ↑ Sheridanpark-Weg is dedicated to Mietek Pemper
  4. ↑ Mietek-Pemper Research Award of the University Foundation Augsburg , accessed on November 3, 2017.
  5. ^ Mieczyslaw Pemper Prize for two studies on National Socialism ( Memento from December 16, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  6. ↑ Kathrin Sänger: Schindler's List - A True Story. Television documentary. Germany, 105 min, 2014. ( SPIEGEL TV, The Saturday Documentation ( Memento of the original from January 22, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and remove then this note. Film information at dokumentarfilm.info, accessed January 22, 2017) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.dokumentarfilm.info
  7. ↑ ZDF page with information and a link to a 45-minute version of the film ( memento of the original from January 22, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , aired January 22, 2017 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.zdf.de
personal data
SURNAME Pemper, Mieczysław
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pemper, Mietek (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Polish concentration camp prisoner in Plaszow concentration camp
DATE OF BIRTH March 24, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Krakow
DATE OF DEATH June 7, 2011
Place of death augsburg